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Happy Hallowe’en everyone! I went as Lilo, from Lilo and Stitch. I wish I had a picture I could post, but you’ll just have to use your imagination. For what it’s worth, I was cute.

Here are the links from G+ and Twitter:

It’s Not a Sprint, it’s a Marathon: NaNoWriMo is upon us again…but writing 50,000 words in one month isn’t everyone’s style. If you’d prefer to build up a regular habit of writing everyday, Johnny Dale offers you a Couch-to-5K type of regimen for writing.

Adventures in Depression: Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half tells you what it’s like to feel depressed. The story doesn’t have an uplifting ending, necessarily, but it’s an incredibly accurate depiction of the mental voice depressed people have in their heads all the time.

Bartender set alight in Gay Slaying: 28-year-old gay bartender Stuart Walker from England was tied to a lamp-post, beaten, and then set on fire left to burn to death last week. Yes, we live in the 21st century. What the hell, people.

Getting up in arms about Comic Sans is so 2001. If you have vehement opinions about why you prefer Georgia over Palatino Linotype, and why Calibri is barely an improvement over that most sacriligious Helvetica-rip-off, Arial, you might enjoy these two typeface-related games:

Kern Type: drag the letters around for optimal kerning and get evaluated on how closely your final product matches that of a professional typographer.

Shape Type, made by the same people, lets you shape the contours and outlines of individual letters from well-known and respected typefaces and compare them to the end product.

Yes, I may have had a bit too much fun with these. My kerning, by the way, is top notch.

But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared do my play—it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ball-bats if the drama department even tried!

Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males!

I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t.

The essay also has this beautiful line in it:

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people run­ning about with lit matches.

Anyone who’s hung around the blog for more than a few posts knows that I’m all for feminism and equality. But denying the worth of works of art just because they focus on one specific group over another, or were the victims of the social circumstances in which they were produced, is just ridiculous.

I want to fight for more TV shows and movies that have female leads, more publication of female authors in genres other than romance, more inclusion of female researchers in STEM-fields….but does that mean I would reject a TV show, movie, academic paper, or novel on the sole basis that it features, or was written by, a (cis-)man? Wouldn’t that make me just as bigoted as the worst misogynist?

This article offers a really interesting and cutting look at Jon Stewart’s popularity in contrast to Michael Moore’s unpopularity, and what that says about the American left:

Stewart’s entire persona is based around a smug self-satisfaction that speaks for his audience’s sanctimonious self-confidence in being right. Whether he’s doing something righteous…he does so arrogantly in order to project the image his followers love when they look in the mirror: The erudite, sophisticated critic who knows better than everyone else.

Moore, while taking all the right positions and displaying all the right characteristics for a political and cultural leader – courage, boldness, uncompromised expression of contested beliefs – represents everything that the modern, educated liberal casts as inferior. Moore is obese. His appearance is consistently sloppy and working class. He’s a college dropout. He has an apartment in New York City, but continues to spend most of his time living in Michigan. He’s devoutly Catholic.

An overweight, relatively uneducated, Midwestern Catholic is the image that most liberals mentally sketch when they consider the cultural enemy. Stewart, on the other hand, is the physically fit, son of a physics professor, a college graduate, and an avatar of the intellectually superior style of yuppie political communication. His format allows him to express it perfectly – play a clip of a Republican saying something predictably stupid, make a bemused facial expression, and then cut it down in an exaggerated tone of disbelief or sarcastic agreement. Cue audience applause.

“Look, you’re a tough kid. And you have a right to be proud of that. But not everybody is as tough as you, or as strong, or as young. Does pride in what you’ve accomplish mean that you have contempt for anybody who can’t keep up with you? Does it mean that the single mother who can’t work on her feet longer than 50 hours a week doesn’t deserve a good life? Does it mean the older man who struggles with modern technology and can’t seem to keep up with the pace set by younger workers should just go throw himself off a cliff?”

YOU know how some people are always cold? There’s a word for that in Spanish—that is, there’s a word, rather than the small string of words I used in English. A woman who is always cold is a friolera (or if she’s Catalan: a fredolica).

Fredolica would be a cute nickname. (I’m one of those people who is always cold.)

The post goes on to discuss the abstract and often emotional concepts packed behind individual words:

We can see this in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s riff on the Japanese word sayonara, which translates as “since it must be so”. She prefers it to the French au revoir, which has the “bravado” of predicting the next meeting, or the English “farewell,” which evades the issue by talking about what the person is going to do.

Every time you find yourself having to say no because of how many commitments you have, write it down. I started doing that and looking at the things I was saying no to… and then weighing those against the things I was saying yes to.

Eddie adds:

No also gets easier to say once you realize that no is only negative on the surface. Underneath it’s powerfully affirmative. Saying no means repeatedly saying yes—to the things you’ve decided matter more.